TUNIS — In the space of one week, Tunisian inspectors have pulled more than 70,000 litres of bottled mineral water out of unmarked depots in two governorates — water that was physically in the country while shop shelves in the same towns stood empty.

The largest find came on Friday in Kalâa Sghira, in the governorate of Sousse, where national security units located roughly 40,000 litres — 3,144 bottles of 1.5 litres and 70,332 half-litre bottles — stored in an unlicensed warehouse. It followed a joint inspection on 5 August that recovered 23,600 litres held by two wholesalers in Sousse city and Hammam Sousse. On Saturday, economic-control teams from the regional trade directorate of Nabeul, working with the municipal guard, seized 8,832 bottles in the delegation of Mida. Nearly two-thirds of them, 5,928 bottles, were stacked inside a depot licensed to sell construction materials.

Sihem Mabrouk, the regional trade director in Nabeul, said the bottles had been concealed in order to create an artificial shortage and profit from speculation. Inspectors opened an economic case against the holder for hoarding and speculation, and began proceedings to consign the value of the goods to the Treasury.

The shortage did not begin with the hoarders

The retention is a symptom layered on top of a real supply problem. Tunisian financial outlet Ilboursa, reviewing the sector, attributes the drop in volumes reaching the market to three converging causes: the repeated power cuts of July, which halted or slowed bottling lines because most plant equipment runs off the public grid; disruption in the global supply of polyethylene used for preforms and caps, linked to continuing tension around the Strait of Hormuz; and a seasonal demand peak driven by the heatwave and the summer reopening of cafés.

None of those three causes is a price shock at the factory gate. Lassaad Mezah, president of the trade chamber for non-alcoholic beverage producers, has denied any increase in mineral-water prices at the production stage — which places the observed retail increases somewhere between the plant and the consumer.

That is the gap the Consumer Defence Organisation (ODC) went after on Sunday. Its vice-president, Thouraya Tebassi, said the association had received multiple complaints about scarce supply combined with rising prices, and accused speculators and intermediaries of exploiting the situation. A supply crisis, she argued, cannot serve as a pretext for unjustified increases charged to households. She said the availability problem should be resolved "soon".

What is being proposed

The ODC's own remedy is narrow and immediate: it is asking consumers to buy from organised, legal outlets, to check displayed against charged prices, and to report abusive increases to the association or to the economic-control services. Its case rests on the arithmetic — if producers have not raised prices and thousands of litres are sitting in warehouses, the increase is being generated downstream.

The seizures point to a second, structural remedy that the control services have begun applying in practice: extending inspection along the whole chain rather than at the point of sale alone. The Nabeul case is instructive precisely because the water was found in a building-materials depot — a place no routine retail inspection would visit.

The deeper exposure remains upstream. A bottling industry whose lines stop when the grid does is a bottling industry that will produce a shortage every time a heatwave forces load-shedding. The Ministry of Industry, Mines and Energy said on 2 August that no further load-shedding was expected for the rest of the summer. If that holds, production should recover. It does not answer what happens the next time it does not.